As many of you already know, I’m a big fan of MaxiVista and that it’s a product that has proven to be essential to my home office setup. I’ve written about this wonderful application before and you can expect some more about it in the next weeks. Since most of the office is getting an overhaul (just operating systems, a few new systems, but not a complete overhaul in layout) I will be putting the new version of MaxiVista through some heavy usage. There are many crucial aspects to the new version 4, the biggest of which is no doubt the full support for 64-bit (the virtual display drivers installed by MaxiVista 4 are digitally signed) and WDDM graphics cards.

I have very little need for a SAN (Storage Area Network), because every single system is already loaded up with many terabytes of fast RAID storage. A SAN, regardless of the size, speed, and cost, would always be slower than the local storage of each system. However, if I wanted to centralize the storage for the systems in the network, whereby the systems themselves were smaller, less top-heavy computers, I would certainly be looking at something like StarWind Server or StarWind Enterprise Server (probably the latter because I like the replication features).

Virtual Machines are great. I rely on them for my work every day and most of my home office network depends on several Virtual Machines (VM’s) for the core infrastructure (SMTP, DNS, AD, backup management, centralized automation, build farms, continuous integration, etc.) but sometimes you just want the abstraction and ease of use of a Virtual Machine while having full support of the host’s hardware (graphics cards, drivers, etc.) and often you don’t want to mess around with the, often complex or entangled, multi-boot scenarios. If you’re in need of that, Windows 7 (and 2008 Server R2) and their native support for Virtual Harddisks (VHD’s) will come in extremely handy. Especially now that you can install and boot your system from a VHD, directly. The following is a bit of a quick start to using VHD’s, some additional details on how I’ve been using them, and a quick look at Starwind’s free V2V conversion application.

There are numerous websites and blogs out there that highlight Synergy while linking to my site and the pictures of my home office as an example. I am happy that I’ve been able to point out this incredibly useful software keyboard/mouse switch but the time has come to start pointing out the utility that is eclipsing Synergy and that tool is called Input Director. Development of Synergy has been on a long hiatus since April 2006 and there’s no sign of a new version. Combined with my experiences where Synergy randomly stops working when a Windows 7 slave system is part of the configuration has led me to give Input Director a try.